Civility and the Decline of Magic
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Copyright: Alan Macfarlane, King's College, Cambridge. 2002 From: P.Slack, P.Burke and B.Harrison, Civil Histories: Essays in Honour of Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) Civility and the Decline of Magic One of the most puzzling aspects of the emergence of a new kind of world in the last few centuries in the West is the development of what we now call 'science'. The shift from a magical and religious dominated cosmology to a mechanistic and secular one, though far from complete and far from confined to the period roughly between 1550 and 1850, is in general undisputable. Until that time it had not happened in other civilizations such as China, Japan or the Islamic world, which had much earlier reached a higher level of craft knowledge than anything then current in Europe.1 So why did it happen where it did, when it did, and why did it happen at all? A number of historians, for example Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, have drawn attention to the 'paradigmatic' or 'epistemic' shift manifested in the work of Galileo, Descartes and others. Yet while providing examples of the shift, neither has been able to put forward any plausible explanation of why the shift occurred. Indeed they both specifically state that they leave it to others to explain why.2 More recently we have been given an excellent, revised, picture of the earlier magic cosmology and its continuity with the later 'scientific' one by Stuart Clark. Yet once again, the author explicitly states that he is not attempting to provide any explanation of why the cosmologies changed over time. 3 Some of the most stimulating suggestions concerning the reasons for the change have, in fact, come from anthropologists, who draw attention to the importance of literacy, the 'trade-travel' complex, Protestantism, the clash of cultures and other factors in the movement to the 'Open society' of modern science and technology.4 Yet they are unable to provide the 1 See, for example, Toby E.Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science; Islam, China, and the West, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. 2 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 2nd edn., 1975, esp. the preface; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, 1978, esp. 162-3, 175; Michel Foucault, The Order of things; An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, 1977, esp. xiii. 3 Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons; the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford, 1997, esp. the postscript. 4 For examples, see Robin Horton, 'African traditional thought and Western Science', pt.ii, Africa, xxxvii, no.2, April 1967 and Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book; The Structure of Human History, London, 1988. 1 Copyright: Alan Macfarlane, King's College, Cambridge. 2002 detailed historical evidence and the assertions remain general. The most ambitious attempt to solve the problem is that given in the two works by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1970) and Man and the Natural World (1983). It is worth reflecting on the ways in which these two books, so influential both in their content and approach, have advanced our understanding of why a great cosmological shift occurred in western Europe in the early modern period. The argument in Religion and the Decline of Magic, somewhat simplified, can be summarized as follows. The central initial premise is based on Malinowski's thesis that magic is 'to be expected and generally to be found whenever man comes to an unbridgeable gap, a hiatus in his knowledge or in his powers of practical control, and yet has to continue in his pursuit.' As Thomas notes, these theories 'constitute one of the few direct assaults on the difficult question of why it is that magical beliefs decline' and hence, inversely, why science emerges. He further quotes Malinowski to the effect that 'Magic is dominant when control of the environment is weak', and Evans-Pritchard to the effect that 'the advances of science and technology have rendered magic redundant.' Thomas's reaction is that 'when applied to the facts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society, it makes a good deal of initial sense.'5 What then, in Thomas's account, was this 'environment' and how did its change help to explain the decline of magic? In the first chapter of Religion Thomas provides an over-view of the insecure world of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in England, which was 'still a pre-industrial society, and many of its essential features closely resembled those of the "under-developed areas" of today.' The pre-occupations with 'the explanation and relief of human misfortune', we are told 'reflected the hazards of an intensely insecure environment.'6 The first insecurity is connected to 'the expectation of life.' Thomas cites evidence to show that 'Tudor and Stuart Englishmen were, by our standards, exceedingly liable to pain, sickness and premature death.' In relation to the latter, for example, he cites the low life expectancy of the aristocracy and though noting expectations of life at birth as high as 40-45 in some country villages, concludes that contemporaries knew that 'life was short, and that the odds were against any individual living out his full span.'7 The second insecurity was the food supply, which 'was always precarious.' 'About one harvest in six seems to have been a total failure, and mortality could soar when times of dearth coincided with (or perhaps occasioned) large-scale epidemics.' People died of starvation and exposure in the streets, and most people suffered from vitamin deficiencies. People were 'chronically under-nourished and vulnerable to tuberculosis and gastric upsets...'8 The third insecurity was disease. 'There were periodic waves of influenza, typhus, 5Thomas, Religion, 647, 647, 648 and note 2, 648. 6Thomas, Religion, 3, 5 7 Thomas, Religion, 5,6 8 Thomas, Religion, 6,7 2 Copyright: Alan Macfarlane, King's College, Cambridge. 2002 dysentery....smallpox', but the most feared of all was bubonic plague, which 'terrified by its suddenness, its virulence and its social effects.' In this pain-filled environment, 'medical science was helpless before most contemporary hazards to health.' Doctors were unable to diagnose and hence to cure most diseases, and in any case, physicians were too expensive for the majority of the population. The fourth insecurity was fire. Thus 'Unable to prevent the outbreak of fire, and virtually helpless during the actual conflagration, contemporaries showed little more resource when it came to bearing the loss.'9 Thomas finds that 'Poverty, sickness and sudden disaster were thus familiar features of the social environment of this period.' Given this background, he is not surprised to find that people were driven to alcohol, tobacco and gambling on a large scale.10 In a long review of Thomas's book, Lawrence Stone echoes and endorses this view in even more trenchant terms. 'Premodern man' lived in a world where 'Both groups and individuals were under constant threat, at the mercy of the hazards of weather, fire, and disease, a prey to famines, pandemics, wars and other wholly unpredictable calamities. This insecurity produced a condition of acute anxiety, bordering at times on hysteria, and a desperate yearning for relief and reassurance.'11 The major part of Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, some six hundred pages of detailed historical evidence, is then devoted to showing the gradual erosion of the magical world view and the birth of modern science. What happened was the 'scientific and philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century'; that is, 'the triumph of the mechanical philosophy.' There was 'a rejection both of scholastic Aristotelianism and of the Neoplatonic theory', which killed off magic. 'The notion that the universe was subject to immutable natural laws killed the concept of miracles, weakened the belief in the physical efficiency of prayer, and diminished faith in the possibility of direct divine inspiration.'12 This was Weber's great 'disenchantment of the world', without which 'modernity' could not have occurred. Yet why did it happen? For the theory that the new mechanistic philosophy can be the explanation is clearly inadequate. Not only is it tautologous - one is trying to explain the growth of a new world view by the growth of that some world view, but the timing is wrong. This latter point is made, for example, by Lawrence Stone. 'The trouble with this explanation is that skepticism about magic and witchcraft was growing among clergy, lawyers, doctors and lay magistrates in the early seventeenth century, before the new natural science had made any real impact.'13 9Thomas, Religion, 7-8, 8, 8-12, 16 10 Thomas, Religion, 17, 17-21 11 Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present, London, 1981, 155-6 12 Thomas, Religion, 643 13Stone, Past and Present, 168 3 Copyright: Alan Macfarlane, King's College, Cambridge. 2002 As Thomas admits, 'The most difficult problem in the study of magical beliefs is thus to explain how it was that men were able to break out of them.'14 Returning to the early Malinowski thesis and the various types of insecurity which he has suggested were 'reflected' in early religious and magical beliefs, the obvious place for Thomas to search is for changes in those insecurities. At first he seems to find some evidence for a major change in the later seventeenth century. He notes that population pressure decreased and that this, with improvements in agriculture, began to overcome the danger of harvest fluctuations. He notices the absence of bubonic plague after 1665 and the fact that, by the end of the century the English, alongside the Dutch, were the wealthiest nation in Europe. He notes improved communications, with the growth of newspapers, for example, which helped people to find lost property.